


Born of God and Beast

by ClockworkRainbow



Category: Hollow Knight (Video Game)
Genre: Gen, character introspection piece, shortfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-15
Updated: 2019-07-15
Packaged: 2020-06-28 14:00:12
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19813756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ClockworkRainbow/pseuds/ClockworkRainbow
Summary: Hornet considers herself, at times.





	Born of God and Beast

She can only just recall her mother.

Faintly, at times, it wanders past her thoughts, on days when Hallownest is quiet in its uneasy, heaving sleep; in the silence of the cavern her footfalls disappear in the sound of a larger beast’s tread, the sensation of a heavy back and the fraying edges of a widow’s veil brushing against her cheek as the warm surface beneath her rose and fell. A sonorous voice carried some foreign tune, fearless of what might hear them.

In moments when she is unlike herself, feeling fragile and cold in the dark, she makes timid motions across a thread drawn taut, tries to pluck echoes of the melody,

She is incautious, and she pays for it, one day when she is cleaning her needle by a trickle of Greenpath’s acid water, diluted just enough by the flow that it is useful, but not endangering. She scrubs away at orange ichor, congested from a difficult flow, and the light creeps in the corner of her mind, and it sings that song to her.

_Mother is here_ , the light hums, over the refrain. _She’s there, and all you have to do is reach for her. So lonely and cold, what the Wyrm has done to her. But you could make it better. You could call her, call out to her, like when you were small, she’ll hear you-_

It is a reflex that saves her, to grip the needle, even though she’s holding the blade of it now. Pale blood runs in the acid stream, along with the orange, and she cups it in her stinging palms, lets the pain keep her firmly awake until there is nothing left, and only her own reflection, dark eyes in a pale face, thrown back at her in the silver surface of the needle.

Only then, does she see to her shaking hands.

She does not try to remember that song again. Over a week passes before she steps over that little stream, a time she keeps track of by the steady fading of the cuts in her hands.

Him, she knows better than her mother, though that is a low bar, and he does not clear it by much. In her mind’s eye, he is tall, though she knows that by the end of it, she had outgrown him, at least, the part of him that he ever deigned to show to others.

He was, she recalls, a part of his environment, continuously; even if caught in movement, it was near-impossible to pick his light from the pale that surrounded him, the clouds of the palace, the glowing illusions and shining metal. A place of miracles, she had heard it described, in lofty and elegant words, and she supposed to someone who had not lived there long enough to grow numb to its splendor, it was perhaps beautiful. Certainly, it had been strange. In that strangeness, he was the one who seemed ordinary, at ease. The retainers were close, so much like ghosts all clad in pristine white elytra, but they breathed, they grew excited or angered, scolded her for a trodden hemline or a dropped glass, for being too loud, too wild. If she ran in the hallways, even merely the product of having short legs in a cavernous space. They had been real, and their rages and irritations did not endear them to her at all, but in a space that itself did not seem real, that stood out as a blemish against the perfect pale- the imperfection of reality in a cold ideal.

She had not felt like a blemish herself- more of an active wound, an aberrant creature. Even when sycophants with eyes she distrusted had loomed over her, spoke lavishly of the King’s Bloodline- and she knew, could see in her own face the things that they cited- a pale visage, tall curving horns. Eyes that knew- and the part they did not say, but that others in the lands beyond had told her- eyes that knew too much, watched too sharply, looked not merely at the surface of things but dug into them.

But she had not belonged to him. The little, nameless thing she had once been had tried- all burdened with a misbegotten hunger to belong at all, to anyone or anything. She had towed after him, in his shadow, tried to slow down and move cautiously and deliberately while still keeping stride.

Eventually, it had been the Lady who had asked her, in a soft undertone, to stop. That it would be better, perhaps, to be elsewhere, away from the palace, from the retainers, from the king.

“It is not your fault,” the Lady had said, not in the way that one reassures a child at all, but in the way of someone who knows too much, and sees too many things, and acts on few of them. “You were not there.”

It is in hindsight, that Hornet, long grown past that little, estranged blot of red marooned in the sea of pale, that the Lady never said it was his fault, either. Never suggested, exactly, that the person who had seen fit to arrange the terms of the bargain, and to take her mother away from her, owed culpability, there.

But she had not been Hornet then, and she had not known better. Merely accepted the words, because they seemed consoling enough, because not being at fault was enough, and somewhere away from the cold halls and the scolding retainers sounded like it might be nice.

Her legs carry her past the falling ash, to the bitter cold at the far edge of the world, to the place where nothing but a great dead body winds across the plains, rotting silently.

In a way, it is not unlike the palace. All pale, all cold, and only him, a piece of the environment, changing, but slowly and strangely and never any closer for it.

The searing light does not try to tempt her about him. The spark in her chest is no strange interloper; between god and beast, it is hers and alone, and it howls and snarls and paces restless circles around the inside of her shell.

She could tear this down, this ancient grave. She knows it with a certainty that ignores that she has never in her life attacked something so large, never had opportunity and will together to test needle on her forebear’s flesh. But the idea that either would fail her is not even one that rises, standing in the shadow of the shell.

She could destroy this. This fading thing, another empty thing he left behind, vast and cold and not the place she was raised, but close enough, and here, where she could reach it.

The wind howls sharp and cold, pulls at her cloak, but it is not her enemy, not driving her back, it is _hers_ , and gleaming threads fly in that wind, aimless but ready, destroyers in potentia.

She breaks them away from herself and moves on, puts her back to the grave.

At the end of it all, he had nothing to say to her. She would not break the silence for his benefit. What had she to prove to him? He knew what she was. She knew enough of him, in turn.

Perhaps that knowing was their problem. To simply know, without caring. It left behind nothing to say. Empty things that could have crossed the gap did not suffice, would have made a liar of them both.

The wind followed her all the way back into the city, a loyal thing at her back, but it was not a tool she could tuck into a cloak pocket, or a material to gather up now and forge with later. She left it in that lonely place, and did not look back.

She still missed it, as she descended into the earth.


End file.
